Adam Silver plans "substantial" changes to NBA draft lottery, due to tanking
· Yahoo Sports
The NBA's tanking problem won't be easily solved. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver nevertheless plans to implement potential solutions.
Via Jared Weiss of The Athletic, Silver said Friday at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference the NBA will make “substantial” changes to the NBA draft lottery next year.
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Silver mentioned possibilities including disconnecting the draft order from records.
"That would be a major shock to the system," Silver said. "Not to forecast where we’re going, but I’m an incrementalist."
The situation requires something much more than incremental moves. Silver has correctly acknowledged that the current process leads to misaligned incentives. The only way to change that is to make draft order depend on something other than record. A straight lottery with all teams getting one ping-pong ball in the hopper would do that.
The ultimate way to align incentives would be to turn the draft order on its head, giving the champion the first pick and the worst team the last. That would absolutely remove any and all temptations to lose games on purpose.
For the NBA, the problem is that some teams have accepted short-term losing as a cost of long-term business.
“There’s been a destigmatization around certain behaviors and I think that’s a broader societal issue," Silver said. "I think in other aspects of society, the guard rails have come off a little bit."
Adam, please don't blame society for your team's business decisions. Blame your teams for prioritizing getting better players later over winning now.
Still, to the extent that societal expectations have changed, the NBA isn't a follower. It's at the front of the freaking line.
For the NFL, it's important to be thinking of ways to get ahead of the problem before it fully and completely becomes one. If/when the season expands to 18 games, it will only become more likely — and more obvious — when teams choose to engineer a lost season in the direction of a draft-day win.